DeWayne Wickham: Civil rights lawyer's fight is not done

DeWayne Wickham

The civil rights attorney who first pushed his way onto the national stage as the lawyer for the family of Trayvon Martin, the unarmed, 17-year-old black Florida boy who was killed by a gun-toting neighborhood watchman, has found more injustice to fight.

He has found injustice in the case of Kendrick Johnson, a 17-year-old Valdosta, Ga., high school athlete whose body was discovered in January in a rolled up gym mat. Local authorities say he crawled into the mat in search of a sneaker and then suffocated to death. Johnson's parents want more answers after a second autopsy by a private pathologist found that some of Johnson's organs were missing and that the teenager died from blunt force trauma.

Crump sees injustice in the case of Alesia Thomas, a black 35-year-old Los Angeles mother who died in police custody after being arrested for leaving her two young children at a police station because she felt her drug addiction left her unable to care for them.

He's outraged by the way justice was meted out in the case of Ernest Hoskins, a 21-year-old black Little Rock man who was shot to death by his employer during a business meeting.

Crump says all these cases leave him wondering whether the post-racial era that some thought would follow with the election that put Barack Obama in the White House is a pipe dream. "I think in some ways, it's gotten even more challenging since the election of our first African-American president, as it relates to racial issues."

That kind of talk doesn't sit well with Crump's critics, who say he's a civil rights ambulance chaser.

"They can say what they want about me," Crump told me before the start of a National Bar Association meeting in Washington, D.C. "I believe we owe it to the Trayvons, and the unknown Trayvons, to advocate for their lives. Their lives matter, and when nobody gives a damn when a little black or brown child is dead on the ground, I'm going to be there."

Crump is a civil rights first responder - and that's a good thing.

Crump is right to question the way prosecutors have handled the Thomas and Hoskins cases. The beating of Thomas at the hands of a female Los Angeles cop was captured by a police cruiser's video camera. The officer repeatedly kicked Thomas in her stomach and groin, and pushed her in the neck. But, prosecutors in the City of Angels have only charged the rogue cop with the relatively puny offense of assaulting a person under arrest.

In an even worse decision, Hoskins' white killer - who admitted to chambering a round and pulling the trigger again after the gun didn't fire the first time - was allowed to plead guilty to manslaughter. With good behavior, he can be released after just two-and-a-half years of the 10-year sentence he received.

It angers me that school officials in Valdosta refuse to release the surveillance video from the high school gym where Johnson died. Their lame excuse is that minor children can be seen in the recording, making it an educational record whose release is prohibited by law. That sounds like the kind of ruling frontier Judge Roy Bean used to hand out - a conclusion that Crump and his legal allies must fight to reverse.

"These parents sent their child to school with a book bag, and he was returned to them in a body bag," Crump said of Johnson's family. "They deserve to know the truth of what happened to their son."

Indeed. But, for far too many black families who encounter this country's legal system, the scales of justice are out of balance. And as long as they are, Crump's work won't be done.